Tuesday, April 29, 2014

I teach two Bookworks studio classes in the Printmaking Program at CCA: Bookworks I is an overview and general intro to bookbindings and book concepts with lots of hands-on making, and Bookworks II is for those students who have an individual project or two in mind and want to go deeper in one area, do some research, and make one to three finished book projects. Because it is an elective for most students, only about one to three students return for Bookworks II each year. This semester, two very wonderful students who have taken both classes—Sami Graf, a printmaking major, and Lucy Dill, a drawing and painting major—are graduating. I'm sad I won't get to continue working with them, but I was pleased to see their senior shows. That they included books in their shows was a plus.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Sometimes it doesn't take much to make me happy. In this case it wasn't that I got new tools, it was that I replaced the old ones. And it made a bigger difference than I thought it would.Rotary cutter. I'd been using the Olfa rotary cutter for years, mostly for trimming my felted pieces while they were wet. Yes, the back of the blade was kind of rusty, but the blade still seemed to cut. I thought. The book I'm working on now is printed on muslin and I have to cut the printed pages apart. I knew I'd been needing a new blade because most of the cut went through, but not all, and I had to cut while putting pressure on the knife and while standing up. They didn't have new blades for the Olfa at the craft store, so to save time, I bought a Fiskars brand and a spare blade. Now I have two knives. The spare 45mm Fiskars blade fit the Olfa. Hooray! I actually like the blade cover mechanism better on the Olfa: you can slide it back with one hand. The Fiskars needs one hand to hold the knife while you twist and unlock the cover with the other.I tried it out. Proverbial "cuts like butter!" Um, room-temperature butter? No pressure.I recently supplemented my collection of self-healing cutting mats as well. The blue one I've had for decades: it is pitted, full of glitter and glue and threads lodged in it, marker and paint stains. The black one lets me use my knives longer. It doesn't have potholes where the X-Acto knife blade tip catches and breaks off. The black one also has a centering ruler on it, which I just discovered. Very handy for cutting my pages in half.

Ah, good tools. Sometimes when work isn't going well, you really can blame the knife. A new blade certainly made my work go more smoothly, which improved my mood, which makes me feel happier in the world, more forgiving and more generous all the way around.

If you can't make it, you can read the works aloud to yourself from the website (issue numbers in parentheses) or order some print copies! Links below are to CreateSpace. They are also available from Amazon.1.1 Creative (it is difficult to explain "creative")—preview image below1.2 Skin (identity crisis)1.3 Floating (shared languages)—preview image below1.4 Haunting Story (creative dream)2.1 Language Equality

Copies of the print magazine, my book art, and copies of Making Handmade Books and Painted Paper will be available for sale at Mrs. Dalloway's after the reading. And I'm just finishing up a new artist book called In the Wake of the Dream that will make its public debut at the event. Hope to see you there!

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Saturday has been library day for our household for decades. In February, I posted about the Mystery Date with a book at my local library and how the librarians there seem to be having fun. Here are a couple more examples of their inventiveness. Following those, a quick (sort of) look at the book I picked up this week.From March 22, 2014"I can't remember the title, but the cover was pink" display

From April 12, 2014A display for National Poetry Month and Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day(This year, Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day is April 24th. Here are my posts about it from 2012, 2012 again, and 2013.)

The book I picked up today on reserve was One-Way Street and Other Writings by Walter Benjamin, translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott. Somewhere I read that One-Way Street was an interesting mix of street signs and directions and words pulled from advertising, in addition to being a kind of collection of essays. It is possible there was a reference in Georges Perec's Thoughts of Sorts, last week's book, an amusing and interesting collection of essays by the Oulipian. (I seem to have returned that book too soon.)

This book of Benjamin's has an intro by Susan Sontag, as well as a Publisher's Note, so although I am on page 78 of 388 pages, I am not very far into it. The description (Perec's?) is proving a bit more interesting than the 59-page essay itself, but there are some gems within. Some of those section titles are: Filling Station, To the Public: Please Protect and Preserve These New Plantings, Germans, Drink German Beer!, and Halt Not for More Than Three Cabs, among others. One section, called "Construction Site" discusses how adults get themselves all worked up trying to invent educational toys and "visual aids" for children, when children are happy to scavenge from the leftovers generated by adult projects and create their own world from the abandoned parts. There's a bit more to it than that, but I think it is a fascinating premise. It was written in 1925-26 and even more relevant today. (Although he doesn't specifically say "cardboard box," that's probably what we are all thinking.)There are a few misses for me, such as when he gets overly dramatic about love or revolution, but there are enough fresh thoughts and images to keep the reader engaged. The humorous titles create interesting contexts as well. And humor is why I'm enjoying the displays at our library. I will leave you with an extremely short, shaped note from Walter Benjamin about writing that taps into our senses, titled "CAUTION: STEPS":

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

During our PrintWorks show, CCA Print Program featured two other concurrent exhibitions. One was a juried selection of our current students' works (which I hope to get to in another post). One was our biennial exchange with Osaka University of Art. Every other year we choose a select group of prints from CCA and Mikae Hara selects work from her students in Japan. We hang the work in our gallery at CCA, and then the show travels to Osaka to be presented there. Mikae brings many of her students with her, and they are treated to various activities, one of which you will see below.This year, a lovely book titled Omnibus arrived with a very strong collection of prints from Osaka University of Art. The lithographs in the book were all hand drawn and printed by the student, Misato Kawakishi, who bound it very skillfully and with a clever structure. Students often ask how to attach their artwork to pages, but I had never thought of this solution. It seems a natural offshoot of the shikishi holder,a project included in Painted Paper (p. 136). Misato used strips of paper to hold her prints. The strips were nicely sandwiched inside a folded sheet (the folds at the fore edge and attached to an accordion spine like Flag Book with Folded Pages on p. 75 in Making Handmade Books.) At the fore edge, each strip disappeared into a slit. At the spine, the strips disappeared inside as well.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

We've seen constraints in poetry in the traditional forms of haiku, tanka, sonnets and more, and recently we've seen 30-word stories, 100-word stories, and erasure texts made from a page of someone else's work. Each of these forms has a structure; poetry forms are often much stricter than the others because of their combined rules regarding rhyme/meter/and sometimes word counts. Erasure or altered text is frequently made by painting over or crossing out words so that a new text is made with only the words left untouched and in the order they appear. While many contemporary writers might balk at the constraints, the rules force the writer to wake up and stretch, often revealing work s/he might not have otherwise written.

In the 1930s, according to Barbara Wright in the introduction to a book I'll be telling you about in a moment, the French writer Raymond Queneau heard Bach's The Art of Fugue and his interest in the music's nuanced variations made him wonder about various approaches to writing styles. He began by writing a tiny story, then rewriting it several times, each time putting a different constraint upon it. The story tells of an encounter on a bus and how he coincidentally saw the same man again later in the day. There is matter of the man being jostled as well as a missing button. The story is told in 99 different styles, corresponding to the titles. A few examples: Retrograde, Precision, Negativities, Anagrams, and Exclamations. The book, originally published in 1947, with the newest revised translation by Wright in 1981, is called Exercises in Style. While the book is entertaining, it also teaches: it points to the possibilities of writing tone and style and cracks the craft wide open.Although Queneau died in 1976, his curiosity and exploration of writing based on constraints continues with the group he founded in 1960, known as the OuLiPo, an acronym for the French phrase, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentialle, commonly translated as "workshop of potential literature." American writer Daniel Levin Becker received a Fulbright to go to France and study the OuLiPo, ultimately was asked to join the group (a rare event!) and he wrote a book about the people, history, workshops and forms called Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature(2012). In one fascinating chapter, "Get it in Writing," Levin Becker gives us a behind-the scenes look at what a weeklong workshop is like, including the forms that were taught then and the personalities behind the writers. He paints an amusing and vivid picture, which includes "interesting socks" and "a baby Rottweiler named Sarko."He lists some of the nearly endless exercises:

Perverb "splices the beginning of one proverb with the end of another"

Tautograms "where each word begins with the same letter"

Prisoner's Constraint "where letters with ascenders and descenders are disallowed"

and writes, "The cool thing about these workshops, though, is that one man's piece of cake is another man's ball and chain; we all excel at totally different things…" (97). These are writer's puzzles, challenges, and ways to stretch your imagination. Sometimes you feel the thrill and want to conquer the form, sometimes you find it hard to engage. It may be easier to begin with a challenge in mind.One constraint, the lipogram (a work that omits words containing one specified letter), was made famous by Georges Perec in his novel La Disparition; it is missing the letter e. It was translated into English as A Void by Gilbert Adair, who had a doubly difficult task. Adair had to make choices between content and elegant writing in order to carry out his e-less orders.Forms are fun. Sometimes finding the content is the hard part. But, as Queneau showed, even the most mundane sketch may be made interesting (if not amusing, fascinating, scintillating, or ridiculous) if treated sideways.A wonderful and detailed catalogue of the forms is found inOulipo Compendiumby Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie. If you are looking for bookmaking with constraints to kickstart a project, see the blog post "A Recipe for an Artist's Book." And if you want to understand this whole concept better, try Daniel Levin Becker's book and leap from there.

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About Me

Alisa Golden is the author of Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms (Lark Crafts, 2011), and Painted Paper: Techniques & Projects for Handmade Books & Cards (Lark Books, 2008), among others. She makes books under the imprint never mind the press and teaches bookmaking and letterpress printing at California College of the Arts. She holds a BFA in printmaking from California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA), and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her stories, poems, and art have been published widely, and she founded and edits the online and print magazine, Star 82 Review.

Golden is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Earned fees are recycled back into books reviewed for blog posts.